


Blood Madness

by moreagaara



Series: Before the Imperium [2]
Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Blood Magic, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Caretaking, Cross-Posted on deviantArt, Deviates From Canon, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fanfiction, Gen, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, Literature, Mental Anguish, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, One Shot, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Originally Posted on deviantART, Posted Elsewhere, Pre-Canon, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 19:10:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20376673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara
Summary: And now, Horus's point of view of Daenus being completely cray-cray.  For some reason this wouldn't import correctly, so I'm just posting it as a new work; in case anyone's curious, the original post ishere!Peep ownership brigade:Games Workshop:  WH40k and relatedMe:  the writing and the Emprah's name





	Blood Madness

**Author's Note:**

> And now, Horus's point of view of Daenus being completely cray-cray. For some reason this wouldn't import correctly, so I'm just posting it as a new work; in case anyone's curious, the original post is [here!](https://www.deviantart.com/moreagaara/art/Blood-Madness-794665501)
> 
> Peep ownership brigade:  
Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
Me: the writing and the Emprah's name

“There has to be a way to get through to him…” Horus muttered. He had brought his brother home almost six months ago—had had to keep him wrapped like a mummy in cloth and ropes for the journey from New York harbor to his farm—and for most of that time, Daenus had acted and reacted with nothing but violence any time Horus came within shouting distance.

He rubbed his face; there were a few fresh scars there, and one eye still twitched from recent restoration. Something, somehow, had made his brother degenerate into a wild, snarling animal, filled with nothing but anger and hatred at the world around him. The feral beast his brother had become lashed out with teeth and claws—the latter formed with blood seeping from constantly weeping wounds on his wrists his brother kept bitten open—at anything even vaguely alive. Horus naturally, but also dolls, stuffed animals, a pile of cans that looked like a standing human in certain dim lights…

Another howl ripped loose from the basement Daenus got to call home. Another crash from shelving, more jars shattering. Did his brother ever sleep…? Shrieks of pain—he must have stepped on the broken glass—then an anguished wail. _Maybe there really isn’t anything I can do for him… _Horus thought, but immediately shook his head against the idea. It wasn’t too late. Couldn’t be. His brother was still in there…somewhere.

Horus got up slowly, walked over to the door into the basement just past the kitchen, unlocked it. Took slow, heavy steps down the stairs so his brother knew someone was coming. A low, angry growl answered him, so Horus stopped at the bottom of the steps, where the light spilling down from the kitchen ended and where the light that should have illuminated the basement should have started, but didn’t.

Apparently his brother had gotten it into his head to rip the wiring out of the wall; some power still made it to the exposed light bulb, since it flickered. Daenus crouched in a corner of the basement, low to the ground, eyes that should have been gold glittering red in the gloom. His gaze was locked on Horus, but he seemed…afraid.

Afraid of the light, or Horus himself? The growl grew louder when Horus moved an arm, then louder still when Horus motioned the door to the kitchen shut. Daenus moved then, but only to show gritted, bared teeth at Horus; they seemed weirdly sharp, but perhaps it was just a trick of the light…

“Hello, Daenus,” Horus spoke quietly, just enough that his voice would carry. His brother’s snarling quieted in response, and he shrank further against the ground. “I heard screaming, so I came to see if you were hurt.” There was a flash of motion; his brother had picked up and hurled a broken piece of shelf at Horus, and now stood hunched in another corner, behind a barricade of tires, still glaring unblinkingly at Horus, who had just enough time to swat the shelf to one side. “I’m going to come a little closer, okay?”

Daenus responded only with silence as Horus took one careful, but noisy step towards him. Horus took care to exaggerate his movements, to make it easy for his brother to figure out where he was going to move next, and hopefully not set him off any further. To at least get within arm’s reach before his brother attacked him again.

Horus had nearly rounded the tires when his brother moved again; a twitch made Horus think he moved to the right—up another shelf, this one nailed to the wall and impossible to easily destroy like most of the others down here—but instead he moved left, over the tire barrier and again placing it between himself and Horus. He licked his wrists, then bared his teeth in a snarl again; this time, Horus could clearly see that he’d used blood magic to enhance the size and sharpness of his teeth, to a point where it must have been uncomfortable to close his jaws. This time, he was utterly silent.

Horus stayed where he was, thinking. _He’s responding to me like a threatened predator. If I get any closer, he will attack again, and it took too long to heal from the last round. _He had been trying to get Daenus to eat again; the plate of food had been knocked out of Horus’s hands, its contents scattered, and Horus had lost a chunk of his leg instead. His brother still hadn’t blinked, so Horus let out a tense breath and slowly blinked himself; when his eyes were open again, Daenus had lowered himself back to the ground, and quickly tucked his feet out of sight, but not before Horus glimpsed shards of glass embedded in them.

“Do your feet hurt?” Horus asked. His brother finally voiced a growl again, his hands twitching—a sign he was about to try using his blood magic against Horus directly instead of using it to enhance himself—so Horus carefully settled on his knees. A position he could rapidly get up from if necessary, but one that hopefully made him look a little less threatening. “Maybe I can help a little…will you let me come closer?”

Daenus hunched against the ground, back on all fours. He looked perhaps a little less frightened now; at the very least, his teeth weren’t quite so exaggerated, even if his hands still twitched. Horus wondered if anyone else would have dared to get this close, considering how horrifying his brother would have looked to an outsider: skin paled from lack of sunlight, eyes brilliantly red, the constant snarling, bleeding wrists, clawed fingers, covered in hard, wiry muscle…to Horus, the effect was less terrifying, nightmarish monster and more pitiable, diminished creature, especially considering how his brother was shivering. _Is he cold?_

It was certainly possible; the basement was fairly dry, but the walls and floor were cinderblock, which held a chill. Moreover, his brother wasn’t exactly dressed: the German uniform Horus had stuffed him into while he was unconscious from the first fight he and Horus had had was in tatters, much like the British uniform he’d been wearing at the time. Daenus hadn’t let him get close enough to change his clothing since. Horus very carefully shuffled one step closer, drawing a loud half-roar from his brother, and his hands spasmed; the scars on Horus’s face split open, and he had to close his eyes to fix them. He took a little time to heal them properly, so that his brother didn’t have an easy way to hurt him.

“You know you can’t hurt me, Daenus,” Horus told his brother, who let out a strangled, enraged noise, and made a motion as though he was going to attack his brother in force, but instead he collapsed into a boneless heap. He whined with every breath, shifted to both continue hiding his feet from Horus and try to ease his own pain.

Horus took the opportunity to cautiously step closer, to kneel next to his injured brother, to very, very gently lay a hand on his brother’s shoulder. Daenus flipped over and whipped one unclawed hand at Horus’s throat; the fingers connected, but the lack of claws meant that Horus wasn’t hurt. His brother attempted to growl, but whines punctuated the sound, and there was pain in his eyes. He made no other attempts to injure Horus.

“I’m going to look at your feet, Daenus…” Horus did his best to keep his voice level and calm; Daenus groaned and closed his eyes. Horus carefully ran one hand down his brother’s body—there was a chill in his too-dry skin—until he reached Daenus’s feet. There was a sharp, kicking twitch in his brother’s feet, but there was weakness in the gesture, and Daenus swiftly relaxed. Horus winced when he saw how deeply the glass had penetrated; most had gone bone-deep, and some of them seemed to have embedded themselves into important veins. “Okay… we’re going to have to go upstairs, Daenus,” he said. He needed his surgical tools to get the glass out; he didn’t want to risk using blood magic on his brother, since he had already lost enough blood that he wasn’t fighting him like usual.

Daenus only groaned in response. He allowed Horus to pick him up and cradle him, delirious with either pain or blood loss. He was mumbling what sounded like half-formed words; it was only when Horus had gotten him into the large bathroom on the first floor—where Horus normally treated his injured farm animals—that he realized Daenus was actually speaking scattered words in Sumerian.

_Kill, kill, kill, blood, death, dying, hurts, blood, kill, hurrrrrtsssss…_

The last word elongated into a protest of Horus pulling the shards out; he vaguely reached in Horus’s general direction, but couldn’t find him. He wailed, twitching harder with more strength as Horus carefully removed the shards and healed the rents in his feet where they had been. Horus tried to calm Daenus by telling him a story about when he had visited the Hanging Gardens just after they’d been completed.

“…killed him.”

“Daenus?” Horus looked up at his brother, who had gone still and was allowing Horus to do as he willed with his feet while he stared blankly at wall. A tear—or was it a drop of blood?—leaked out of one of his eyes.

“King…killed him…” Daenus answered. Another tear slipped out of his eye. His face wasn’t contorted with rage at the moment, and he was almost reasonable. At the very least, he seemed to have registered that Horus was making the pain go away. “Took head…”

_He’s speaking again._

But then Daenus groaned and started muttering his litany again, this time with a little more focus on the word ‘blood’. He lifted his forearm to his mouth and bit down hard before Horus could stop him; he rubbed the pulsing wound against his face and almost seemed to purr, rocking gently on the table Horus had put him on, eventually appearing to fall asleep.

Once Horus had managed to remove all the glass from Daenus’s feet, he carefully examined his arms. There were bite scars all over them, most of them slightly puckered where they hadn’t quite healed properly under the natural influence of his blood magic. The most recent one was healing more slowly than it should have, leaving red-raw marks where it had been.

Daenus groaned in his sleep-like trance when Horus gently urged the healing to finish; the newest bite scar vanished into fresh, smooth skin. After that was done, he didn’t move and so Horus gently picked him up again and carried him over to the living room, where he settled his tranced-out brother on the couch. He carefully wiped the blood off his brother’s face with a towel, drawing a few small protests, but his brother stayed in his trance, even after Horus turned the radio on to listen to a baseball game.

A few hours passed before Daenus moved. Just a small twitch at first, enough to alert Horus that Daenus’s blood-induced trance had ended, but then he was still. Horus watched him look around out of the corner of his eye, pretending not to have noticed Daenus was awake and aware. It was fairly clear that nothing registered as familiar, and that he remembered nothing of the shards in his feet, or of Horus removing them.

He did, however, register Horus, and so reacted as he typically did: a sudden shriek peeled out of his throat, and he surged towards Horus, who had to defend himself once again from his raging, animal brother. A part of Horus’s mind remained detached and clinical as he fought Daenus off him one more time; he noticed his brother was aiming for the belly again, using his teeth more often than usual, and once he finally latched onto his brother’s arm, he didn’t let go or rip flesh off.

Instead something flashed in his eyes for a second, something that might have been gold, and Daenus calmed. He drank the blood that flowed out of the bite this time, relaxed as he did so, rocked himself a little, his face smoothing back towards something resembling humanity. But the rage surged up again the second Horus flexed the arm, intending to carry his brother back down to the basement, to familiarity and safety. Strength even Horus had never before felt flooded his brother; claws sank into his arm, there was a pop, and then a sudden rip—

Daenus and Horus staggered apart, Horus swearing and clutching an empty socket where his right arm had been, Daenus rearing back with the emancipated arm in his mouth, nearly as startled as his brother. Horus squeezed his eyes shut, continued swearing under his breath, and carefully reshaped a new arm out of the spurting blood; when he opened his eyes, Daenus had retreated under the couch with the arm, and by the sounds of things, he’d found a way to soothe his bestial hunger.

Horus was in no mood to lose another arm trying to pull him out. Instead, he just sliced the tips of his fingers open and drew a trail on the floor leading from the spot under the couch his brother had claimed for his own to the basement door. This he propped open with a heavy brick while he left to tend his farm. He took extra care to ensure that the wards which ought to prevent Daenus from leaving were fully charged and working as he left the house. Hopefully, by the time he got back, Daenus would be back in the basement of his own accord.

This did not turn out to be the case. Instead of being in the basement, Daenus had curled in the middle of Horus’s bed, and had brought an arm bone with him; he had marked each wall and floor of the house with his own blood. When Horus entered the bedroom, ready for an immediate fight, Daenus made a noise similar to a laugh. “Daenus…” Horus said with a warning tone, still bracing for his brother to pounce without notice.

It didn’t happen. His brother’s face was contorted with dark amusement instead of fear or anger when he looked at Horus, and the red in his eyes seemed to have bled out of the iris into the surrounding sclera. “I know you.” Unlike just a few hours before, his brother’s voice was clear rather than strained. “You bleed pretty.” His brother shifted his weight to all fours.

“Daenus. Calm down,” Horus made his voice sound forceful. This didn’t sound like his brother, even considering the past six months. Daenus made the chuckling sound again.

“More…” his brother’s head tilted slightly, as if considering the best possible angle at which to strike Horus and draw the most blood. 

“If you calm down, you can stay up here for the rest of the night,” Horus promised him. He almost said day, but remembered that the sun had been near to setting when he had come in. He readied his strength to shut down his brother’s blood magic for a time. The move usually bought him peace for a few minutes, which was long enough to get him somewhere he couldn’t hurt anyone other than himself.

Daenus blinked at the offer. “Or kill you. Stay up forever.”

In answer, Horus lifted his regenerated arm. “You can’t hurt me permanently.” The power he would need to shut his brother’s magic off collected invisibly in his hands and eyes. His brother would leave himself open for one of them, hopefully.

Daenus’s eyes narrowed as he thought. He remained still, for the moment, as Horus took a step closer to him. Then another. He registered Horus’s new position with the third step, and launched himself forward with a howl that swiftly cut out when Horus caught him. He seemed dizzy as Horus carried him back downstairs to the basement, unable to fully wrap his mind around what had just happened.

Once he was back in the basement and Horus had put him down, he again reacted like a frightened animal and retreated to somewhere Horus couldn’t easily reach. This time it was underneath a broken, old machine Horus hadn’t gotten around to fixing up and selling off. Once again he snarled a predator’s warning: he was large, dangerous, and if Horus got any closer, he _would _attack. 

By this point, Horus was just exhausted. “Good night, Daenus…” he said as he left. He cleaned the house before he went to bed; it wasn’t hard to remove the blood from the floors and walls, only further tiring since it was so widely scattered. He mixed the congealing blood in with the fertilizer for his crops, then retrieved the scattered arm bones from around the house; these he placed in a bucket to be crushed and mixed into the compost in the morning.

Even though he was effectively dead on his feet by the time he was finally able to go to bed around midnight, he lay awake for a long time. Daenus had been lucid for a few precious minutes. He’d spoken, with effort, and he’d remembered something outside of the immediate moment. Even if it still revolved around death and killing…he’d remembered.

That meant he was still in there…but what had that other voice been?


End file.
